Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter1

Written two years after the death of her daughter Jane, Pulter offers a personal elegy that intermixes Christian and classical references. Addressed to other parents, the poem laments the fact that the passing of time, marked by seasonal changes in the natural world and the movement of planets, has not lessened the intensity of her grief, which is not conventionally resolved with Christian affirmation of the afterlife here. Writing in the genre of the “child-loss” poem, Pulter’s tenor is unusually personal; it vividly narrates the moment of Jane’s death by contrasting the purity of her soul with physical signs of illness: the red blotches of fever akin to red roses on a bed of lilies or the blood of a wounded deer in the snow. The poem concludes with the speaker poignantly imagining herself as Niobe, the classical figure who turned to stone for excessive pride in her children, someone whose petrification represents the lifelessness the speaker feels in her state of grief.

Editorial Note

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible.

After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.

Jane Pulter

Jane (1625-1645) was one of Pulter’s fifteen children. Her full name and a note, “Baptized May 1, 1625, Buried Oct. 8, 1645 at 20,” are written in a different hand from the main scribe after the title.

suspire

breathe

Chloris’s

goddess of spring

curious

artful; elaborate; delicate

snowy white

the traditional color of mourning in China; the color of the kittel (a smock) in which a Jewish corpse was dressed and which congregants wore, as a reminder of death, on Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur. In his book on comparative religions, Samuel Purchas mentions the Hebrew practice of dressing a corpse in the white clothing typically worn on the Feast of Reconciliation (see Purchas His Pilgrimage, 1626, p. 206).

she

Jane

virgin

chaste, unsullied

Philomele

nightingale; in mythology, Philomela was raped and deprived of her tongue by Tereus, eventually being changed into a nightingale, a bird whose song stops each spring (Eardley).

mortifying

fatal, austere, self-denying

sylvan

forest-dwelling

her

Jane

Tellus’s

goddess of the Earth

involved

enveloped

Phoebe

goddess of the moon

As often filled them with her brother’s light

for twelve months, the moon has alternately been crescent shaped, or “hornéd” (a form emblematic of war) and full, reflecting the light of her brother, Phoebus, the sun.

she

Jane

pining

yearning

twelve houses

signs of the zodiac

splendency

splendor

antipodes

opposite side of the world; those who in any way resemble dwellers on the opposite side of the globe.

brack

rupture, breach

story

life

roll

move in cycles; move in an unsteady manner; rotate, turn, or pivot around; trust in God

poses

posies, bouquets or bunches of flowers; figuratively, short verses

damask roses

species of rose from Damascus

Like lily leaves sprinkled with damask rose

These next nine lines are inscribed on a separate page in the manuscript, with a notation indicating where they are to be inserted in this poem. They replace a line that describes the snow as “unsoiled” rather than “unsullied.”

hart

deer

his

originally “her” but corrected here, and in lines below, to male pronouns.

to the life

exactly reproduced or expressed

Niobe

Apollo and Artemis transformed Niobe into a weeping rock for bragging that she had more children than their mother.

Curations offer an array of verbal and visual materials that invite contemplation of different ways in which a particular poem might be contextualized. Sources, analogues, and glimpses into earlier or subsequent cultural phenomena all might play into possible readings of a given poem. Don't show again